Flat Stanley's Adventures in Nederland - Part 1

Back in October, I received a letter from Vivian asking me to participate in a project at School....They had recently read a book about Flat Stanley and his adventures, and everyone in the class made their own. These Stanelys would be mailed to relatives and friends all over to have their own adventures and then the class would place pins on a map for all the places Flat Stanley has been through the school year. I did my best to be a good big sis and participate, but part of the 'assignment' was to write a story about his adventures. I've had great intentions to do so, but have yet to get all the ideas about stories, pictures, google maps and wikipedia entries into one flow...until now. Here is the first of my two part series about Flat Stanley and his Dutch adventures!

Flat Stanley has been all over the Netherlands with Kevin and I between October and December. During those months, he lived in my camera case, so that whenever we were somewhere interesting, I could take a photo with him....I didn't always remember to get those 'Kodak moments', but wherever my camera was, there was Stanley!

When we came to the US to see Oma and Opa in December, we brought him back to the US in our carry- on luggage..nothing less than first class for Stanley. :-)

Here are the adventures (with pictures when I remembered) we had together while he was visiting, together with a map of all the places we visited in the Netherlands. On each pin or flag on this map, I've added a description of the town and what adventure it was that took place. Click on the blue pin to see what we've done:


View Larger Map


Visiting Schiphol Airport/Watching Planes:

Schiphol is an important European airport. In 2007, Schiphol handled over 47 million passengers, ranking fifth in Europe. From Schiphol, direct flights are operated to more than 260 destinations in 91 countries.

Schiphol has five main runways - the latest of these, the Polderbaan (nicknamed the "fifth runway", was completed in 2003. Plans have already been made for a sixth main runway.

The Schiphol Air traffic control tower, with a height of 101 m, was the tallest in the world when constructed in 1991. Schiphol is geographically the world's lowest major commercial airport. The entire airport is below sea level; the lowest point sits at 11 feet below sea level; the runways are around 10 ft below sea level.

In the main terminal, there is an observation deck called the Panorama Deck that you can walk 360 degree around and view planes in the gates as well as taxiing, taking off and landing. On a clear fall day, we went up to there with Flat Stanley to show him the planes.



Another time, on a rainy Sunday, we went back to the Airport to eat pancakes and have Starbucks lattes. Schiphol is the only place in the Netherlands that there is a Starbucks! Stanley came along so he could have a little taste of 'home'......




St Maarten

Stanley also came with us on the night of St. Maarten - St Maarten is celebrated in some areas of the Netherlands, (The province we live in is one of them). While the holiday has a religious background, the modern celebration would be closest (I think) to an American Halloween. St Maarten is on November 11th, which fell on a Wednesday this year. I took off work early so that we could have dinner with the three other children that made up the group in Almere, and we started the rounds at 6pm, when it was already dark. Here you can't see Stanley, but his arms were over the outside of the bag so that we was along for the ride the whole evening. It was cold, but it stayed dry for the two hours we were out. That's a whole lot of knocking and singing!